Mister Cook and the Cordwood Cornbinder

from Hemmings Classic Car

In high school, I was in trouble before I got to Mr. Cook's geometry class. First off, I was a somewhat nerdy kid deeply into cars, without the requisite lemming-like devotion to prep sports jock-sniffing. Second, I strongly disliked the rituals associated with jock-sniffing, starting with mandatory after-class pep rallies. Third, I'd ended up in summer school for basic algebra and was alarmed at the notion of trying to understand rhombuses and quadrilaterals. Then, on the first day of school, I ended up in Mr. Cook's classroom.
Let me try and describe it. Mr. Cook looked like a cross between Clark Kent and a very young Richard M. Nixon. His whole professional wardrobe consisted of extremely baggy gray serge suits, the sort of garment that David Byrne of Talking Heads would turn into a fashion icon 20 years hence. Mr. Cook also wore black, ripple-soled shoes, devoid of shine, like a guy from the gas company might have. He charged down the halls in a bent-forward, wide-legged strut, math textbooks jammed under one arm, and a gigantic three-ring binder, probably eight inches thick, under the other.
At his desk, the very first thing he did was open the binder, which was stuffed to bursting with hole-punched onionskin pages, hand-coded by date. Maybe 30 seconds had elapsed since Mr. Cook barged through the door. By then, the classroom was already in anarchy: students screaming, walking around, throwing books, throwing spitballs. Mr. Cook would write down the date, time, violator's name and type of transgression in his monster binder. I looked at the wall clock. Half the class had elapsed and we hadn't even discussed a basic line intersection. This went on 40 minutes a day, every day. Once, I sneaked a look at the binder and saw that Mr. Cook had been keeping an uninterrupted log of misbehavior since the JFK years.
We all knew that Mr. Cook drove an unusual vehicle: a 1969 International Travelall, yellow with woodgrain sides. I looked through the windows once and saw a military surplus gas mask on the back seat. This at a school where a couple of students drove Cadillacs, and one teacher had a 427 Corvette. For a place that worshipped the culture of playground sports, come to think of it, there was a fair amount of interesting rolling stock there. One kid had a 1967 Barracuda 340 with a lift kit; he later swapped it for a Triumph. A budding narcissist in my own class got a new 1974 Pontiac Luxury Le Mans from his indulgent parents. The driver's ed car was a new 1974 Ford LTD. So at this place, a thumped Travelall really stuck out.
With a monitor as vigilant as Mr. Cook, it was inevitable that everyone in the class would get busted at some point, including me. But I pulled off a twofer: The same day I ended up in the binder for talking, I got nailed by an unannounced attendance check (just like a jailhouse head count) for cutting a pep rally. The doubled-up penalty was a Saturday-morning detention, supervised by Mr. Cook.
Three of us were in the gulag that weekend. Mr. Cook showed up in the Travelall, its rear cargo area full of chopped firewood; he lived alone in a 1950s house trailer with a little space heater. I expected a day of torture worthy of the Tonton Macoutes, but instead, Mr. Cook treated us respectfully. He called us his fellas. Took us out for a driving lesson along a busy highway, the painfully wood-crammed Travelall swaying and crashing on its bump stops. It was noisy, slow, and bizarre in a fun way. Told us he didn't want us driving recklessly once we received our treasured New Jersey licenses. Fed us breakfast. Demonstrated that unlike some of the school's hierarchy, he didn't think your individuality, or divergence from the sort of mindless rah-rah conformity that defined the joint, made you less of a person. He went out of his way to make the day bearable for us.
Much later, I came to understand that Mr. Cook, the strange guy who dressed like Inspector Henderson in The Adventures of Superman and drove a somewhat beaten Travelall, had things intersecting in his head pretty good. He wasn't afraid to be different and was way too smart not to realize that he was. Mr. Cook and the Travelall vanished one summer; I never learned where they went. But I did manage a C in geometry amid all the disruption. Thanks, fella.

This article originally appeared in the February, 2011 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.